Fudzilla claims it has details that point towards Nvidia launching their next generation graphics chip, codenamed Fermi, in January 2010, as opposed to in December, as originally planned. Granted, Nvidia never officially announced a release date, but did mention December as a viable time.
However, DigiTimes — a far more reputable source than Fudzilla — claims that the date is even further into 2010, as Nvidia CEO stated that the card will likely launch in the first fiscal quarter of 2010, which begins in March. If true, this will mean that AMD’s cards, which are already out, will be given a good 6 month head start as the only DX 11 cards available on the market.
Nintendo Wii Fit Plus expansion to Wii Fit has takes the top spot on the sales charts in the UK (read our Wii Fit Plus review), while the highly regarded Dragon Age Origins debuted at a solid 5th spot, the full top 10 list below:
- 1. Wii Fit Plus
- 2. FIFA 10
- 3. Wii Sports Resort
- 4. Football Manager 2010
- 5. Dragon Age: Origins
- 6. Forza 3
- 7. Mario & Sonic Winter Olympic Games
- 8. GTA4: Episodes from Liberty City
- 9. Pro Evolution Soccer 2010
- 10. Tekken 6
StarCraft 2 producer Chris Sigaty revealed at Russian game expo IgroMir (yep, they got game expos over there too), that the StarCraft 2 beta has been pushed into next year. Blizzard has previously announced that StarCraft 2, or rather, the first chapter, named Wings of Liberty, will be released during Q2 2010, which begins in March.
Gran Turismo 5 has been delayed many times, indicating that the developer wants to make a perfect game, which is good (unless your game is called Duke Nukem Forever). GT5 has a firm release date for March 2010, but it appears that the game could’ve been released earlier, and it’s held back until March for marketing purposes. Now developer Polyphony Digital revealed that while the March 2010 date is set for Japan, Sony us still thinking about when to release it to the rest of the world, and it may very well be later in 2010, possibly in Fall 2010 (although this is pure speculation at this point).
EA has announced that they’ve acquired social network game developer PlayFish for 300 million dollars. PlayFish, which makes games for social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, will receive an additional $100 million if certain sales/revenue goals are met before 2012. PlayFish has developed 10 titles which have 60 million active users on Facebook and MySpace and over 1 billion play sessions each month.
Germany, not exactly known as the most game friendly nation in the world — far from, actually — will be getting an edition of Modern Warfare 2 that doesn’t feature the ability to kill civilians, which was a very controversial subject on Modern Warfare 2 a few weeks ago. The airport scene, where you can kill civilian passengers with no remorse, will be different in Germany. If you shoot any of the civilians or injure them, you’ll get a game over screen. We suppose it’s not that big of a deal, Modern Warfare 2 has a lot more to offer. Unless you count it dedicated servers for the PC version.
It seems that all games are getting books deals these days, from Gears of War, to Mass Effect, to Oblivion, to, well, everyone, really. That’s including Assassin’s Creed, which will get its own novel, titled Assassin’s Creed: Renaissance, written by Oliver Bowden and published by Penguin Books. The novel will be released later this month. You can check out the book on Amazon, although there isn’t much information there, nor is it available for pre-order.
PC piracy is at an all time high, some estimate that over 90% of games played on the PCs aren’t actually bought, but downloaded and cracked. Developer RedLynx, of course, isn’t really happy to hear that kind of news, and they have now resorted to a rather new strategy: they uploaded their own game before the pirates did.
With the release of RedLynx’ Trials motor cross game, the developer hurried and uploaded its own game to popular BitTorrent sites, with one feature missing from the game: leaderboards. RedLynx then hoped that the pirates would love the game and miss leaderboards so much that they went out and bought the game.
Did it work? Well, they don’t really know, but there’s definitely a lot of folks playing Trials without leaderboards, that’s for sure.
Dunno how we managed to let this slip by us, but apparently Steam is running a great weekend promo (like most other weekends), letting you buy Mass Effect for only $10.
Yep, $10 bucks gets you in on the Mass Effect universe — not a bad deal for a game that’ll net you a good 50 hours of gameplay time — and you should finish it just in time for the release of Mass Effect 2, which will be out early next year.
We first heard about the new Zelda game for Wii at the 2009 E3 expo, where Shigeru Miyamoto himself unveiled the news. Now Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has refused to confirm the game for 2010 in an interview with GameTrailers TV, saying “We haven’t committed to Zelda in 2010″.
Nintendo is known for delaying their highly anticipated titles like Zelda and Mario, but in the end, it has often resulted in a better overall product. Let’s hope it’s the same with the next Zelda, even if we have to wait until 2011.
